


for all the works and days of hands

by fallencrest



Category: Mob City
Genre: Gen, LA, M/M, Mobsters, UST, carpentry, probably one-sided epic love forever but maybe not i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-30
Updated: 2014-04-30
Packaged: 2018-01-21 10:15:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1547081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallencrest/pseuds/fallencrest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It turns out Sid is just as interested in making something as breaking it - and what has he been doing all these years, if not building an empire for Ben? (Also, he builds furniture, piece by piece.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	for all the works and days of hands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sometimesilie (Serpentsign)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serpentsign/gifts).



> Written for [Eve](http://slackerpentecost.tumblr.com/) as part of the [Mob City Exchange](http://mob-city-exchange.tumblr.com/%22). Her prompt was "Someone stumbling upon and reacting to Sid’s life outside the mob (inspo: [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw33m7gaPQo) Robert Knepper says that Sid has a life outside the mob and that he makes furniture)." I may have focussed a bit more on what Sid does than on a reaction to it but hopefully it still fits the bill.

Sid runs his hands over the surface of the board, good pine, traces his fingers along the grain like following the course of a river on an interstate map. He hums, slight but content. It’s good board, nothing fancy but he doesn’t need everything in life to be fancy and he figures he’ll make something of it easily enough. It’s mostly off-cuts, smaller than he’d like, but it isn’t unusable. He likes the challenge the wood presents, knew when he’d seen it left out in an alley down the side of a dumpster that it was worth something – to him, if not to whoever tossed it. 

He prefers a project like this – likes when the materials come to him and come with limitations he can work with. It’s like solving a problem and, damn, if Sid isn’t the man to come to with a problem you need solving. He has always loved the satisfaction of brokering resolution, tidying up after other people’s messes. 

He picks up one of the smaller pieces, weighs it up in his hands, sees how it spans and judges it just big enough for purpose. He assembles the would-be object in his mind and takes each board in hand before he saws or lathes or alters a single piece. Yes, he has what he needs. There’s no board quite large enough to make the seat of the chair but he figures he can work out how to weave a seat or else pay someone to do it for him. He’d rather the former but he could settle, knows the value of a compromise almost as well as he knows not to rely on the work of others.

It had taken him a deal of effort not to start working on it as soon as he’d found it but he’d had other things to do then, had stowed the wood at his apartment and actually managed to come close to forgetting about it soon enough. That was how life went. Life had a tendency toward turning into a whirlwind around him and, while Sid was pretty good at not letting it catch him up entirely, he tended to get find himself trapped in the eye of the storm when things got real bad. 

Still, the little sack of wood had been waiting for him when he’d got in last night and he’d taken it up like a promise of something to fill the expanse of tomorrow, the great empty space in the wake of the storm. He’d decided tomorrow would be a beautiful day, even if Ben Siegel’d be too hungover from the night’s celebrations to experience any of it. 

 

He shapes the back rest first, a starts with the outline then works in a soft curve. His work station is a battered table, nicked and scratched all over from rookie errors back starting out but now he planes the wood with a practiced motion, smooth and certain in the pressure he applies. He watches his own arms as he works, surprised at the way he’s caught them almost acting of their own accord, rehearsing a motion with the same care as rehearsing a sonata. His hands are less clean now than when he plays his instrument but not as dirty as they get in his other line of work; and his shirt sleeves are rolled up, as if to indicate to all that he means business. He could almost wonder whether he looks now the same way he looks when he means a different kind of business but he doesn’t suppose there are many people alive he could ask.

Done with the top bar of the back rest, he takes up four smaller pieces for supports and starts adjusting them for length, rummaging for a pencil from a side table and placing it to rest above his right ear once he’s done marking out the lengths of wood.

The shop he works in isn’t much of a shop: an actual hollowed out store front more than a proper workshop. It’s in a tumbled down, unfashionable limb of LA, the sort of place that doesn’t exactly make Sid think of back home (LA is a long, long way from New York) but has the right sound to it somehow, the right note played in a different pitch. It has that fraction of resemblance to it, so that, seen at a glance, for an instant, in the right mood, you could forget it wasn’t home. A little like when you find a lover who, seen just from that one angle or only when they laugh, could make you forget they aren’t the one you really want. 

Some people think Sid is hung up on New York, on the old days, and that he wants to go back. He doesn’t like to tell them how wrong they are. He’s a smart guy – he doesn’t want to go back because he knows there’s no going _back_ and, really, what’d he do even if he could? To be twenty again and doing dirty work off the leash to keep things rolling, doing near anything to make a buck - it’d be a stupid thing to wish for and, if he could do it over, there’s nothing he’d change. Not one thing. Well, except maybe bury a few metaphorical bodies better. (The physical ones were doing just fine where they were. Even in his teens and twenties, he’d been damn good at his job.)

There isn’t anywhere in the world Sid’d go that isn’t here. Not necessarily right here, not standing in some downtrodden part of town, working a circular plane across an off-cut of pine. There’s a place in just about every city in the world that Sid could do that and feel just the same. That place, that “here”, isn’t so specific. 

The place where he’s meant to be, where he’s always meant to be, is here in another sense. Maybe he made this place for himself one nail at a time, careful and calculated the way he’d like it to be; but he knows well enough that he’s never had quite as much control over this thing as he’s wanted. Somewhere, he lost his grip on the rope. Maybe it was the moment he stepped in front of that knife and almost died, maybe that was the beginning of his second life; or maybe it was a life sentence that first time he saw Ben Siegel smile. Probably all those things come together in some big old joke being played at his expense but he’ll never know it either way. 

All he knows is that he’s here because his world is here, the world where all doors open and anything seems possible because Ben Siegel smiles. It’s a hell of a world to live in and Sid isn’t about to quit. Besides, he likes LA in its own way, just not in a way he cares to explain. New York was their coming up days, him and Ben and Meyer; but LA, LA is their future, their ambition, LA is Ben Siegel cut loose of all the resentment and the struggle to get by, up against poverty and Italians. LA is Ben Siegel’s town so there’s no way Sid could want to be anywhere else.

 

He works through the day, stopping around dusk to step out and get something to eat from a little place on the corner. He gets a smile from the tired waitress, holding down the fort alone while her kid sits at one of the tables, swinging his legs and complaining of his boredom. 

On his way out, Sid slips the kid a ten dollar bill, knowing the mother would feel obliged to object to a tip which would cover his tab more than a few times over but damn sure she’ll be grateful once the ability to decline is out of her hands and equally sure that he’ll never notice it’s gone.

 

Back at the shop, the pieces of wood now closely resemble the components of the chair. He sands them down, sat on a stool under the one slightly flickering bulb he’s got in the place, and makes adjustments here and there. He checks the legs will slot into the base of the frame and the supports into both frame and back slat and he smiles with the certainty of a day’s work well done. 

 

He’s dyeing the pieces, one by one, when he sees the headlamps pass by the window, hears the car, and turns to face the store front. 

He can’t see anything out there which means the car hasn’t pulled up right outside. They don’t get a lot of cars in the neighbourhood even at busy times of day but it’s near midnight now and Sid doesn’t think he’s heard one come by in at least a few hours. 

He goes back to the leg he’s brushing with dye, weighing up the possibilities, deciding to face them as they come. There’s no sense becoming irrational and pulling a gun the way a jittery idiot would, not when probability’s in favour of friend or cop, and pulling a gun’s likely to get you laughed at or arrested or both. 

 

The door opens and the bell rings before Sid turns around again and as he turns he hears Ben Siegel’s voice say “hey,” half casual, half worn out. 

Ben looks a mess, the way only Ben Siegel can ever look a mess. His suit’s only a little rumpled – and that’s because it’s silk, not on account of any carelessness – and his hair is parted to the side but less controlled than it usually is when Ben’s taking care of his appearance (which is any time except when he’s lost it completely). It’s the tired look on his face that gives him away more than anything tangible. 

“When they told me I’d find you here, I didn’t realise,” Ben says. “You never told me you were doing this.” Sid looks down at the chair leg and the brush still in his hands, at the way his hands are stained a little with the dye and then back up at Ben. They don’t say anything about the few things Sid had made back in Williamsberg. It takes a visit from Meyer, most often, to get them talking about New York. And he doesn’t say it’s just a hobby because Ben knows Sid well enough to know that Sid doesn’t do hobbies, not the way a regular guy would. Sid’s carpentry isn’t about filling time or having an ongoing project any more than his music is about either of those things.

“Anyway,” Ben says, “I came here to thank you.” He lets out a sort of laugh, the strained kind, “We came pretty close back there, huh?”

“Pretty close,” Sid says, because he can’t pretend to brush it off. 

Ben pushes a hand back through his hair and this is unusual, this whole thing is unusual. Ben turned down and out of his element. Hungover and out-of-step, Ben tended to get defensive and out of control, but now he looks around the place with a sort of curiosity and a little warmth. 

“Come get a drink with me.” Ben says, almost the way he’d normally say it, except how he doesn’t say something about how great the place they’re going is or how good a night it is to be them and be in LA. Instead, he says, softer than usual and a little fond, the way he does when he’s ruled by a woman instead of pursuing one outright, “I’ll wait while you finish up but come drink with me.”

“Alright,” Sid says, and he looks from the spindle of the leg in his hand to Ben, who seems as unfinished and in pieces as the chair to look at him. “But this can stand until tomorrow.”

 

He lays the chair leg to dry with the other parts he’s already done dyeing and knows he’ll regret the uneven work tomorrow, that he’ll find waiting for the undyed pieces to dry frustrating, but knows those feelings weigh in at a feather’s weight when placed in the balance with the slight smile that crossed Ben’s face when he agreed. 

Sid packs up and goes to rinse his hands under the faucet in the backroom, leaving Ben to loiter in the front for a moment. He’s still no picture when he reemerges. His sleeves are still pushed up and there’s still sawdust lodged in every fold and crevice of his clothing and a little sweat-stuck to his skin around his collar. But there’s something like fondness in the way Ben looks at him. It’s a recognition, Sid thinks, that this is the way they always are – part of who they are. They aren’t the same: Ben in his silk suit and Sid in his shirtsleeves, Ben with his anger and Sid with his resolution; and they weren’t the same when they were kids, either. Ben had smashed in his first violin in frustration, learning to play, and they’d had to steal another from out of a pawn shop just to keep the scheme afloat; whilst Sid had picked up the delicate thing, almost too-light, and run his figures over the lines of it like a rhapsody, plucked to hear the notes before he knew how to draw the bow. 

When Sid draws level with Ben beside the doorway, Ben puts an arm over his shoulder and pulls him in close. It’s a gesture which would normally seem generous and demonstrative coming from Ben but now it seems a simple evidence of closeness and easy comfort. It isn’t ostentatious, just a little action which seems almost thoughtless, a natural sort of nothing to evidence their everything. 

Ben smells a little of the way he’s probably been drinking through the day in an attempt to stave off the hangover but mostly he smells like Ben – like expensive cologne and an old tenement back in Brooklyn that might be the one place Sid would ask to go back to, if he were stupid enough to think that he could. 

They step out into the LA night, the almost silent street in a suburban slum, and walk together to Ben’s car, conspicuous and powder blue and waiting, and Sid lets Ben drive even though he knows another man wouldn’t. He tells himself it’s because it’s Ben and because it isn’t worth the argument, but he knows the reason in his bones, same way he knows where he belongs, knows he’d let Ben take him anywhere and never mind the consequences, never look back.


End file.
